


Honey & Gasoline

by Pigzxo



Series: Tastes Like You [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Canon Era, M/M, not quite smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 04:48:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5361980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigzxo/pseuds/Pigzxo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam's annoyed that Blue won't kiss him, Ronan's trying to be a good friend but... come on. There has to be some way to shut Adam up. (Mid second book)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honey & Gasoline

            “I just don’t get it,” Adam said.

            Ronan looked up from his spot on the floor, eye blurred from the words in his textbook that he had most definitely not been reading. Church was sacred, but certainly the tiny apartment behind it didn’t count, did it? It was all right if Ronan wanted to stare blankly at his textbook, breathing in the intoxicating gasoline scent that wafted off Adam, and think of much, much better things they could be doing with their time.

            Of course, Adam was actually doing his reading. He had three pages of notes beside him and looked to be nearing the end of the assignment. Now though, the heels of his hands in his eyes, sandy blonde hair hanging over his finger tips, he muttered something indistinguishable. Because Adam, when he wasn’t doing homework or working five zillion jobs or at school or sleeping (for fuck’s sake, did he even sleep?), was thinking about Blue Sargent and the torture that was not kissing her.

            To say the constant refrain annoyed Ronan would be an understatement. It ate at him. Just the way Adam said her name, _Blue,_ like she was something magical, the best damn thing since sliced bread, stabbed him through the heart. How he agonized over kissing her, their lips touching. How he had probably imagined a thousand times what it would taste like, his thin, chapped, cracked lips rough as sandpaper against hers.

            Of course, there was another side of his annoyance: Blue not wanting to kiss Adam. Ronan knew, somewhere in the back of his twisted mind, that this was something he should be happy about. Blue kept her distance. Blue didn’t want to kiss Adam. Blue maybe, just maybe, didn’t even _like_ Adam that way. But, in reality, the whole concept baffled Ronan. Someone didn’t want to kiss Adam Parrish. Adam Parrish, the boy who smelled of gasoline, whose sharp jaw line could cut through a tree, whose lips cracked at all the right points. Just by looking Ronan could feel their friction against his skin. Anyone who didn’t want to kiss Adam Parrish, in his professional opinion, was fucking batshit crazy.

            “She says she’s too young,” Adam said, another phrase Ronan had gotten tired of hearing. He liked sitting on Adam’s floor, silent, a part of his life, but he hated when Adam actually remembered there was someone else in the room, someone he could bitch too. “But, I mean, we’re all the same age. Do you feel too young? I don’t feel too young.”

            Ronan grunted noncommittally. His eyes fell back onto the page in front of him. He read the first line. He was reasonably sure that if he survived this conversation Adam might let him take pictures of his notes.

            “I don’t want to pressure her or anything but... I thought we were going somewhere, you know? And then I had to go and make an ass out of myself...” Adam trailed off, tapping his pen on the page. He breathed out and Ronan could imagine the movement, Adam’s shoulders up, his chest puffed, the air inflating him for a moment before bringing him back to down to the level where he thought he belonged. “I think she hates me.”

            “I wouldn’t blame her,” Ronan muttered. His knuckles were white around his pen. He knew he should drop it, not crack it, but the plastic was already starting to splinter.

            Adam went on, Ronan’s words unheard. “She always ducks away from me and now she’s been avoiding spending time with me... not that I ask but... god, is it such an awful thing to want to kiss a girl?”

            _Yes,_ Ronan thought.

            “I just want to know what it’d be like, a kiss like that... breath mingling, hearts beating, hands in hair...”

            Ronan exhaled a deep breath and shifted on the floor. Adam’s imagery was visceral and, even if he was picturing Blue, Ronan had no problem putting himself in her place. Adam’s breath, warm and honey like his Henrietta accent, twisted between them. Ronan’s heartbeat, stuttering to keep its pace in line with Adam’s, slow and steady, but racing forward too fast, too hard. His hands in Adam’s blonde hair, pulling, Adam’s gasp in his mouth...

            “I just want to kiss her. One kiss. Does that have to be terrible? Do I have to be a monster for wanting that? My lips and hers. That’s all I want.”

            “Jesus fucking Christ,” Ronan breathed out, his words finally loud enough to catch Adam’s attention. Blue eyes rose from the book and met Ronan’s, slightly shocked but not surprised. The words came out on their own, the same smart ass comment he would have made had this monologue come from Gansey or Noah or Blue herself. “If you wanna be kissed so fucking badly, I’ll do it.”

            The two of them were frozen in time, the words hanging in the air between them. Ronan blinked, for a split second considered that he was in a dream and maybe he could take the words back, pluck them out of thin air, and throw them back into Cabeswater depths. But no, this was real, and Adam’s blue eyes trained on him were real and the slight, slow-moving curl of Adam’s lips was real. Very real. That smirk, that tiny little smirk that looked so wrong fish-hooked on such an innocent face, sent shivers up Ronan’s spine. He knew he had taught Adam that look, that way of holding his mouth, and he wondered if he could make him better at it with just a little hands-on lesson.

            “You just wanna kiss me,” Adam said dismissively. Like he had known all along, like the entire idea of Ronan saying those words was a joke that they shared, and shared often. His words were exactly what Gansey or Noah or even Blue would have said in reply and this should have calmed Ronan’s racehorse heartbeat. But it didn’t. Not at all. Because something about the way Adam said the words, the way his eyes looked just a little sad under the joke, spoke of the inherent truth of the words. The truth Adam _believed._

            Ronan snorted. “Fuck you.” It was the closest he could get to saying _no_ without lying. He brought his eyes back to the textbook in his lap, skimming over the second page of the assignment.

            “Hey,” Adam said, so soft that Ronan had to look up and he immediately wished he hadn’t. All the joking had gone out of Adam’s eyes and now he was... imploring. Hopeful he hadn’t offended Ronan, hadn’t pushed him away. “It’s okay. I know. I don’t... care.”

            Ronan cocked an eyebrow, challenge clear. “Know what?”

            “That you like me.”

            Ronan made a dismissive noise.

            “I know I probably shouldn’t talk about Blue so much around you—”

            “I don’t want you talking about Blue because it’s fucking annoying,” Ronan said. He met Adam’s gaze, tried not to lick his lips. But it was hard not to looking at Adam, looking at his chapped lips. He wanted to lick them, to fix the cracks with his saliva. Not the point. What had he been saying? “You sound like a teenage girl in some bad rom-com.”

            “Sure,” Adam said, in a way that made it entirely clear that he didn’t believe a word that Ronan said.

            This, for no particular reason, infuriated Ronan. He looked at the top of Adam’s head, sandy hair hiding his eyes from scrutiny, his entire body curled over the textbook. The pen cracked in Ronan’s hand, plastic shards bit his skin. Adam’s whole countenance was easy. He had let it go already, let go Ronan’s compulsive need to step around the truth so that he didn’t have to lie. Adam Parrish knew him too well. So well, Ronan thought, that if he broke his rule just once, _just once_ , he could convince Adam otherwise.

            “I don’t like you,” Ronan said. And that wasn’t really a lie. Maybe the way Adam took it was a lie, but the words themselves weren’t. At the moment, Ronan hated Adam and his smug smirk and the way his hair curled across his forehead and the easy curve of his shoulders over the book. He hated the way that Adam looked up at him, blue eyes searching and curious, the smirk gone from his cracked lips but still somehow there, in his eyes. Ronan’s venom came in full force, snapping the next words through the air like a whip. “At all.”

            He expected Adam to balk at the words, at the challenge. He expected Adam to start a fight, give him a reason to storm out of the apartment, notes unfinished, brimming with anger he could turn into something other than the horrendous excitement in his veins. Adam had to give him a reason to punch a wall, scream at the air, go flying down the street at a million miles per hour in his BMW.

            Anything would be better than the steady look Adam gave him. He was getting good at staring, too good. Ronan really needed to stop giving away his tricks. Staring contests were his game, but he could feel the heat rising in his chest and knew it would be no time at all before it touched his cheeks.

            “Kiss me then,” Adam said.

            Anything but _that._

“The fuck?” Ronan asked, surprised he managed the words. He lost the staring contest. He _definitely_ lost the staring contest. The words _kiss me then_ echoed through the room, forced Ronan to blink. He tried to refocus on Adam’s eyes, on his steady gaze, but his eyes flicked to Adam’s lips, dry, rough, beckoning.

            “Kiss me,” Adam repeated. He blinked once, in control.

            The fucker.

            “How the fuck,” Ronan started. He paused, the words caught in his throat, and coughed. The smirk was back and Ronan would do anything to wipe it off Adam’s lips. He fixed him with his best glare, the one he usually reserved just for midnights with Kavinsky, rubber burned on asphalt. “Would that prove anything?”

             “You kiss me and if you can leave at that, I’ll believe you. You kiss me and you can’t...” Adam shrugged. “I won’t.”

            Ronan just stared. Silence was his weapon, but somehow it seemed to work against him in that moment, just like his stare. Steady blue eyes, a mouth that rushed to fill silences, lips formed around words Ronan wanted to hear, just not in this context.

            “Plus, either way, I’ll shut up about needing to be kissed. So win-win. If you’re telling the truth.”

            “I never lie.”

            Adam smirked at him.

            And Ronan got over whatever it was that was holding him to the church wall. He dumped his textbook on the ground, took one quick stride to the side of Adam’s bed, and sat down beside him. Their eyes never left each other, Adam’s gaze steady, unperturbed, Ronan’s burning, his whole body on fire, every second like a flicker of a heat wave seen through a microwave.

            Ronan cupped Adam’s chin, the smallest prick of emerging stubble in the palm of his hand. He told himself to breathe, not to let air catch in his throat. His eyes dipped from Adam’s to his lips, his incredible, broken lips. There was a reason Ronan had never suggested Adam buy some lip chap and it wasn’t just because he didn’t want to hear a lecture on how _things cost money._

            Fuck him. Fuck Adam Parrish and this stupid game and his stupid smirking lips and this impossible moment where there was only an inch of space between them. Breath mingling, honey and gasoline, the tips of Ronan’s fingers long enough to scratch at the back of Adam’s hair. He leaned in, their noses brushed, and he was shocked by how dry Adam’s skin was, how dry every inch of him was. He was hyperaware of their legs rubbing together, denim on denim, too close. Too close. Part of him knew he needed to pull away, pull out of this stupid fucking game, because he was going to lose.

            Ronan took a deep breath. His eyes flicked to Adam’s one last time and took in the wonder there, the depths of the blue that no longer contained a smirk. And for a moment, one beautiful moment, Ronan could pretend that this was the kiss Adam was really desperate for, this was the moment he had been complaining about all night. Every time he had said _Blue_ he had meant _you_. And now Ronan had his jaw in the palm of his hand, bone tough and jagged.

            He was already a dead man. Lose-lose. Pull back, he proved Adam’s theory. Kiss him, he proved Adam’s theory. Sit there for even a millisecond longer memorizing every stitch in Adam’s jeans, the flecks of almost pure white in his irises, the raw power that came off of him from Cabeswater. Adam was made of dreams and Ronan was born to shape them.

            Ronan let his lips touch Adam’s, no pressure, just touch. And he knew immediately he was right, he had always been right. Adam was sandpaper rough, cracked at the edges, like pressing his lips to warm wax paper that dissolved in saliva. Ronan took a deep breath, filled his lungs with honey and gasoline, and kissed him. Light pressure, but his heart beat right out of his chest. He knew Adam could hear it, hear every resounding echo of it.

            Ronan breathed, ready to pull back already, but then he felt Adam rise to meet his pressure. Soft through their roughness, his lips moved with an ingenious kind of knowledge that Ronan was at once certain he did not posses and that Adam could teach him. Ronan moved back into the kiss, his hand wrapping around the back of Adam’s neck, pulling him closer.

            Adam’s lips parted and Ronan licked their edges, skin flicked across his tongue. Then he entered Adam’s mouth, sweet and dirty and instantly Ronan knew why Gansey was so in love with Henrietta. Adam was his Henrietta. Adam was home.

            With that thought, Ronan pulled out of the kiss, too fast to pretend that it wasn’t the intensity of it, the beat of his heart like he’d done a line of coke, that made him move back. He took one deep breath, easy, solid, and then looked back at Adam, who had completely forgotten to look smug. So Ronan looked smug for him, his signature smirk still in working order, not wiped away by the taste of Adam. He shrugged. “Easy.”

            But it was anything but easy. He was sure Adam could see that. If Adam knew, had somehow figured out that Ronan liked him, well, it wasn’t much a stretch to say that he could see through the word. Not easy to pull back but easy to kiss him. Ronan’s heartbeat in his ears, he could feel the bones in his jaw, his lips felt wet and hot, raw and red, and his fingers itched to reach back into Adam’s hair, across Adam’s chest, down his pants.

            “Back to the reading then,” Adam said.

            Ronan stared at him for a moment, shrugged. The look in Adam’s eyes was different now, not the smug challenge and not the pitying knowledge, but not something Ronan recognized either. Just the way those blue eyes met his was different, electric in a way it hadn’t been before. Now Ronan knew for sure he’d never be able to keep up the charade, not if Adam now looked at him like _that_ every single time they hung out together.

            Off the bed, onto the floor, Ronan picked up his textbook again and laid it on his lap. He tried not to let on that it was a little harder to lie the textbook flat against his crotch now, his jeans too tight against him, all of him alive. He may not be able to keep the secret much longer, but he could keep it for tonight. He could sit there for another hour on two, pretending to read, Adam’s taste on his lips already fading.

            Silence ebbed around them, no longer a comfortable companion but something alive. Ronan blamed it on the ley line. He blamed it on Adam’s connection to Cabeswater. He blamed it on his inability to fall asleep right then and there, and pull out a dream Adam Parrish not hung up on Blue. No part of him was ready to admit the discomfort of the quiet had to do with the fact that the room was no longer filled with the ease of Adam’s breathing, the steady rush of his own heartbeat. Now Ronan’s heart was out of time and Adam’s breathing, though still shallow for the most part, gave way to gulps of air that he fought.

            Ronan’s focus on the book didn’t last that long. He looked up at Adam, the hair in his eyes, his fingers curled white around the textbook cover, tan skin suddenly stark porcelain. Ronan gulped in breath in time with Adam and looked back at the reading. Words swam in his vision. He needed to leave. He needed to go to sleep. It was late, wasn’t it? He could leave without it seeming suspicious.

            “You know what else,” Adam said suddenly. His voice felt like an intruder on the uncomfortable silence. Honey soft, Henrietta to the core, his accent raged through Ronan to the point where Ronan barely had the time to realize that that accent only came out when Adam was nervous. Barely. He met his gaze. Adam uncertain, unsure, his fingers tapped against the textbook cover. He seemed to lose his nerve. “That I want to do with Blue.”

            Ronan swallowed his groan. His eyes darted back to the reading he would never finish.

            “I want to go further than just kissing,” Adam said. And even though the implication along with his other words was that he was talking about Blue, something about the stutter in Adam’s words made Ronan look up. The Henrietta stutter. Long vowels. Pursed lips. Adam’s tongue over his bottom lip, like he remembered Ronan there a second before. Ronan’s heart shocked back into rhythm momentarily before going out again. “That bother you?”

            “Yeah,” Ronan growled.

            “You wanna shut me up?” Adam shook, still unsure. This, the boy who not ten minutes ago had claimed to know Ronan liked him, challenged him to kiss him, to prove it.

            “Fuck yes.”

            Ronan was up off the floor faster than last time. No anticipation, no hesitation, his lips crashed down onto Adam’s. He pressed too hard, too rough for Adam’s soft countenance, but it matched the feel of his lips. It matched Ronan’s uneven heart and his shaking hands and the way his tongue seared over Adam’s, now instantly aware of how to do this, where everything should go.

            His hands were tight around Adam’s neck, one stretching for Adam’s hair, the other pressing at the collar of Adam’s shirt. He could feel cool skin, sharp collarbones, the dip between them. Adam’s heart beat in the palm of his hand, steady, so fucking steady.

            Ronan kissed him harder. His hand skipped over the fabric of the t-shirt, soft cotton worn down by years of wear, softer than anything Ronan had ever touched, ever had touch his skin, better than silk and satin and whatever the fuck else his overly expensive clothes were made of. He crept his hand under Adam’s shirt, fingers splayed across his abs, stronger than Ronan would have thought. Adam was skinny, so skinny, but also tried by labour, the muscles of his body unaware they were there but strong, flexed in the moment. He could feel Adam’s spine, the hard muscles of his back, he brought him closer, into him, wrapped him legs around Adam and pulled him back onto the bed, on top of him.

            Adam followed his lead. He raised his hands to let Ronan take off his shirt, but had no real business being on top. Ronan turned him over, hungry, his lips skipping from Adam’s to his jaw to his neck until he heard Adam gasp. Ronan’s knees pried Adam’s legs apart, wriggled to get inbetween them. He rutted up against Adam, could feel him hard under him, lowered his lips to glance across Adam’s strong chest. Only his arms and his neck and his face were tan. The rest of him was porcelain. Very breakable porcelain.

            “Ronan,” Adam breathed out, just loud enough that Ronan knew it wasn’t a mistake, wasn’t his name breathed in pleasure. A warning. Ronan looked up, his lips just above the waistband of Adam’s jeans, one his hands half-cupped around Adam’s hard cock. Adam’s eyes were wide and terrified, his heartbeat hammering against Ronan’s other hand, still pressed to his chest. “We can’t.”

            Ronan felt the words settle over him, his brain send the message to the rest of his body. But he was still keyed up to go, ready to _let go_ and have the feeling swallow him. Adam heaved under him, his cock hard, Ronan’s fingers trying not to roughen their grip as Adam breathed, tried to catch himself in the moment like Ronan could never catch himself.

            “Isn’t this what you want?” Ronan asked, his voice soft. He tried to keep it playful, not to let in the hurt. _Just friction,_ a small voice inside him said. _Friction does this to a person._ “What you want to do with Blue?” Sharp venom touched his words, escaped.

            “No,” Adam breathed, his voice small, smaller than the one in Ronan’s head. Had Ronan not been listening for it, the word could have easily been lost to the sound of the two of them breathing.

            Ronan rolled off of him, scooted up on the bed so that his head was also on the pillow, the two of them side by side. Their bare arms brushed, but there was no solution to that other than to leave, and Ronan couldn’t leave. Part of him, a fucking stupid senseless part of him, told him this wasn’t over. That word wasn’t the end of the moment, the end of the conversation, the end of the night.

            Adam turned his head to him, blue eyes deep and soft and sad. He reached up a hand to trace the bones of Ronan’s cheek, his fingers hot against his skin. Ronan tried to breathe steadily, not to blink. That was his weapon, right? Silence, staring.

            With Adam neither felt like a weapon. They felt like enemies.

            “What’s wrong?” Ronan asked, because it had to be asked.

            “We’re too young,” Adam said.

            Ronan laughed. A bitter, musical thing that filled the room, filled his nightmares. The same refrain Blue had used on Adam used on him. Fitting. Like a thousand fucking flaming swords to the heart, but fitting. He was, after all, in love with one of his friend’s boyfriends. Maybe he deserved a little bit of pain for it.

            “For sex,” Adam amended. He turned his body on the bed, faced Ronan. The soft hand on his cheek became a gentle but sturdy grasp on the back of his neck. Adam kissed him gently, sandpaper used like clouds. “Not kissing.”

            Ronan thought, for the time being, he could live with that.


End file.
